I watched Bruce Willis’ latest Die Hard flick, Live Free or Die Hard aka Die Hard 4.0 recently. Assuming suspen­sion of disbe­lief, it was a reason­ably good movie. Apart from the crazy hacker stuff and John McClane’s (Willis) virtual indestruc­tibility, it was true to its prede­ces­sors in form and style.

Did you say McClane was indestruc­tible in the previous movies too? True, but then he didn’t battle a military jet or kill the bad guy by shooting him through himself. I bet the older John McClane could have given the Termi­nator a run for his money.

Never mind all that: what I simply cannot compre­hend is how everyone seems to have access to every single Govern­ment network possible. I do mean everyone — the hackers as well as the crackers. I know people can do some cool things with their computers, but this is way too much. Anyway, I was glad there was no third-time-lucky-password sequence (that is, the hacker/cracker is presented with a password prompt that he cracks on the third try, without ever having done it before.)

One impor­tant flaw, in my opinion, was that they paired up the wrong people. You know the classic plot — boy meets girl, rough times together, lots of destruc­tion, hugs and kisses all around, love at last, et cetera. But how the heck is that supposed to happen if the guy (Matt Farrell, played by Justin Long) spends all his time with McClane instead of McClane’s daughter? Looks like they really messed up that part of the story.

Overall, I would give it a rating of 3.5 out of 5. It could have been better. But wait — was it just a beta release?

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 16:52 and is filed under Movie Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.